What a difference a break makes. Last year young Irish actor Colin Farrell, best-known at home for his roles in the television series, Ballykissangel and Falling For a Dancer, was an unknown abroad. All that changed, however, when US director Joel Schumacher chose Farrell to star in his latest movie, Tigerland, which has earned the Irish actor rave reviews since opening in the US this month. Now major movie offers are pouring in and his asking price has shot up to $2.5 million per picture.
When we meet on the day after the North American premiere of Tigerland, Colin Farrell is still high on the excitement of the night before. However, as the darkhaired, brown-eyed and stubbly, 24-year-old Dubliner relaxes over a beer, it is clear he is keeping his feet firmly on the ground.
"It's all been pretty amazing," he says, as if he needs to pinch himself to be sure it's for real. "Everything has happened so fast. So much of it has to do with being in the right place at the right time. Being asked to meet Joel Schumacher was just an unbelievable slice of luck.
"I'm being asked to meet all these big directors now. But isn't it mad the way things happen? Just because one person like Joel thinks you're ready to do his film, suddenly so many people are interested in you. I feel so lucky, because I know there are many actors out there who would have done an amazing job playing Bozz, my character in Tigerland. So many actors, but I was lucky to be the one that was chosen."
When we meet, Farrell is on a break from the Texan locations of his second US movie, American Outlaws, in which he plays Jesse James at the head of a cast which includes Kathy Bates, Timothy Dalton and Scott Caan. Next month, he reunites with director Schumacher for Phone Booth, starring in a role, originally intended for Jim Carrey, as a publicist who answers a pay phone and finds an assassin on the other end of the line. And in January, he co-stars with Bruce Willis, playing the title character in Hart's War, which will be shot in Prague and features Farrell as a prisoner-of-war assigned to defend a black soldier accused of murder in a German prison camp.
What has triggered all this interest in Farrell is his performance in Tigerland, a tight, gritty drama set in a Louisiana boot camp in the autumn of 1971 as a platoon of young men, conscripts and volunteers, are put through a gruelling training regime by foul-mouthed officers before being shipped off to Vietnam - and almost certain death. Farrell gives a charamismatic, star-making performance as Bozz, the cocky, rebellious soldier who defies and frustrates the authority figures.
Farrell's portrayal of this potentially showy character is perfectly judged and firmly eschews mugging or overplaying.
"That's what I was worried about," he says. "I could have made him just an annoying pile of arrogant, obnoxious cheese. I hope I reined it in enough."
The US critics agree. Farrell's "good looks and charisma speak well for a vital Hollywood career", noted Variety, while Entertainment Weekly commented: "charismatic Irish actor Colin Farrell's anonymous days will be behind him after this". Time magazine ran a short profile of Farrell this month under the heading, "People to Watch".
The monthly magazine, Interview (formerly Andy Warhol's Interview) put Farrell on the cover of the current issue, where he is photographed by Bruce Weber. Inside, Farrell is favourably compared to James Dean and the young Robert de Niro by writer Graham Fuller who declares: "This Irish actor is ready to take off big-time. He's particularly easy on the eyes and can mesmerise you with his performances, which are completely authentic".
Farrell found the world premiere of Tigerland "absolutely nerve-wracking - because I'd never seen myself on a cinema screen before. I was in America, working on the accent, when Ordinary Decent Criminal opened in Ireland. So I was on the phone to the mother and the sisters and they were outside the cinema in Dublin with the mobile phone and the champagne in their hands, telling me they had just seen it."
Sustaining his Texan accent was the most difficult thing for him on the set of Tigerland, he says. "Hitting it every now and then was easy enough, but it took a while just keeping it going all the time and getting to the stage where you're not thinking about it one bit, when you can throw it away and you don't hear your voice anymore and you can listen to everybody else. I worked so hard on it. I put everything I had into it."
Colin Farrell was "born and bred" in Castleknock in Dublin and now lives in the city's Irishtown area where he has a cottage. He describes himself as "the baby of the family", the youngest of four children born to Rita and Eamonn Farrell. His father is a former Shamrock Rovers footballer.
Farrell started out as an actor in Owen McPolin's low-budget, Kerry-made feature, Drinking Crude, and his performance caught the attention of agent Lisa Cook of the Lisa Richards Agency, who signed him up. He joined the Gaiety School of Acting in 1996 and dropped out after a year when he got the part of Danny Byrne in Ballykissangel. Then he played a semi-autistic 17-year-old in In a Little World of Our Own at the Donmar Warehouse in London, and landed a role as one of the criminal sidekicks of Kevin Spacey's character in Ordinary Decent Criminal.
Farrell takes up the story of his rise and rise. "I got a call from Los Angeles, asking me to meet Joel Schumacher in London. I flew over to London on a Saturday and met him in his hotel room.
"We talked for about two minutes and that was it. I didn't get any feedback from him. It was just, `How're you doing? Nice to meet you' stuff. I thought it was a complete waste of time. And then he called Lisa a couple of days later and said that he wanted me to read for the part of Bozz. I just couldn't believe it.
"So my sister Catherine held the handicam and did her best southern belle accent and we acted out the scene in the bar with the girls, and a couple of other scenes, and we sent them over. He liked the tapes, so I followed the tapes over about two weeks later. Then I read with him again in person, and I found out about a month later that I was cast as Bozz.
"It just seemed completely unreal then. I kind-of knew that I had the potential for what the film is, which is a tough, honest, well-told story about people and where they go to and what they go through in times like that, and how scary it is. What a system! They took all these Christian kids and turned them into killers - at the age of 18."
It was tough, physically, he says. "I'm not the fittest, you know, with the double bill," he says, whistling and pointing out his cigarette and glass of beer. "Although it really was tougher on the head. It really was a head-wrecker to do the film. Thinking so much about what the characters were going through and then acting it out. And it was all shot in a month, just 28 days, which is really short for a feature film.
"Joel Schumacher didn't ever have to ask us to pick up the pace and work harder at any stage because we were all so into the job.
"All the lads were so into doing good work. We all raised each other's games and buzzed off each other. If Joel wanted to tell you something you were doing, or something about your character, he was over, just whispering in your ear to remind you of the motivation. He always made everything so easy, and so simple to understand. He's so straightforward. No messing.
"He would remind you of the basic things that were happening: you're in boot camp but you're pissed off because you'd love to go home and you really want to have some sex because you haven't had any in 12 weeks. And that's fair enough, because that is the motivation for some of the scenes. So in your head you're thinking about how you're sick of being in this boot camp and how you'd love a shag. He knows what strings to pull with the shagging thing, because that was exactly the way it was for us, the actors, while we were playing those characters."
Tigerland was shot in Jacksonville, Florida, and the cast and crew stayed in a small town called Stark, a prison town where Ted Bundy was executed and Jeffrey Dahlmer was held. "It's a very famous prison, but it's a pretty miserable town," says Farrell.
"It's got no energy. It's got one bar and a Pizza Hut. We stayed in the Days Inn for two months. We didn't get out or go to any of the cities. "We spent two weeks in boot camp before we started shooting, to get into the whole thing, being dragged out of bed at five every morning. It was tough, but we were together the whole time - living in the barracks, sleeping together, showering together, eating together. We were never out of each other's company. We all get to know so much abut each other. It was great, and I think that's why the relationships between us work so well in the movie."
Last week Farrell finished work in Austin, Texas, playing Jesse James in American Outlaws. "It's a combination of comedy, romance and adventure," he says. "It's so much lighter than Tigerland, and was so easy to do by comparison. Kathy Bates is in it as my mother and it was brilliant working with her. She's lovely.
"It's been up to 114 degrees some days in Austin and I'm there dressed in black and wearing a jacket down to the heels going around on horseback. They built a whole western town for it. It was great fun pushing open the doors of the saloon. We've been having loads of fun."
He peppers the conversation with questions about Ireland and Irish films and actors, and he's clearly looking forward to getting back to Dublin after four months in the US. "I miss it a lot," he says. "I can't wait to get back and see everyone and have a good pint and just chill out."
Tigerland will be released in Ireland in the spring